The Vehement Flame eBook

When Maurice saw his wife the next morning, it was
with Mrs. Houghton’s warning—­emphasized
by the presence of a nurse—­that he must
not excite her. So he sat at her bedside and
told her about his trip, and how he had got ahead
of the Greenleaf heirs, and how he rushed back to Mercer
the minute those dispatches came saying that she was
ill—­and he never asked her why she was
ill, or what took her out to the river in the cold
dusk of that March afternoon. She didn’t
try to tell him. She was very warm and drowsy—­and
she held in her hand, under the bedclothes, that letter
which proved how much she loved him, and which, some
time, when she got well, she would show him.
All that day the household outside her closed door
was very much upset; but Eleanor, in the big bed, was
perfectly placid. She lay mere watching the tarnished
gilt pendulum swing between the black pillars of the
clock on the mantelpiece, thinking—­thinking.
“You’ll be all right to-morrow!”
Maurice would say; and she would smile silently and
go on thinking. “When I get well,”
she thought, “I will do—­so and so.”
By and by, still with the letter clutched in her hot
hand, she began to say to herself, “If
I get well.” She had ceased worrying over
how she was going to explain the “accident”
to Maurice; that "if" left a door open into
eternal reticence. So, instead of worrying, she
made plans for Jacky: “He must see a dentist,”
she told Maurice. On the third day she stopped
saying, “If I get well,” and thought,
“When I die.” She said it very tranquilly,
“When I die Maurice must get him a bicycle.”
She thought of this happily, for dying meant that
she had not failed. She would not be ridiculous
to Maurice—­she would be his wife, giving
him a child—­a son! So she lay with
her eyes closed, thinking of the bicycle and many
little, pleasant things; and with the old, slipping
inexactness of mind she told herself that she had
not “done anything wrong”; she had not
drowned herself! She had just caught a bad cold.
But she would die, and Maurice would love her for
giving him Jacky. Toward evening, however, an
uneasy thought came to her: if Maurice knew that,
to give him Jacky, she had even tried to get drowned,
it might distress him? She wished she hadn’t
written the letter! It would hurt him to see it....
Well, but he needn’t see it! She
held out the crumpled envelope. “Miss Ryan,”
she said to the nurse, huskily, “please burn
this.”

“Yes, indeed!” said Miss Ryan....

There was a burst of flame in the fireplace, and the
little, pitiful letter, with its selfishness and pain
and sacrifice, vanished—­as Lily’s
handkerchief had vanished, and the braided ring of
blossoming grass—­all gone, as the sparks
that fly upward. Nobody could ever know the scented
humiliation of the handkerchief, or the agony of the
faded ring, or the renouncing love which had written
the poor foolish letter. Maurice wouldn’t
be pained. As for her gift to him of Jacky, she
would just tell him she wanted him to marry Lily,
so he could have his child.... And Edith?
Oh, he would never think of Edith!